The seventh issue of the Amarok Newsletter is out. We talk about Amarok's success in the LinuxQuestions.org yearly poll, new features in the upcoming Amarok 2, and continue to point out interesting related projects. Read on for some Amarok lovin' from Wil Wheaton.

In the other news, Wil Wheaton from Star Trek reviews Amarok. When you see quotes like "Amarok is much more than just another music player or iTunes clone; in fact, it blows iTunes away. It is Kryptonite to iTunes Superman. It's the Death Star to iTunes' Alderaan." and "[...] it's like having Uncle Joe Benson and Rodney Bingenheimer sitting in your living room with you", you know you can't miss it!

Comments

I hope the final version of Amarok 2 will have removed the redundant borders that are present in the screenshots provided by this Amarok Newsletter. See for example the many borders around the left pane titled "Building Collection Database..." in this screenshot:

In general, I hope all KDE 4 apps will be audited to remove these unnecessary border. Robert Knight, the principal author of Konsole, has started doing just that (http://lists.kde.org/?t=117156103800002&r=1&w=2), but I would think this is a huge job. Perhaps the answer is to change the defaults in these widgets so border=0 unless otherwise specified...

I should point out that I am not the "principal author of Konsole", just the person who has been maintaining it for the last six months or so. I believe that most of the code was written by Lars and Waldo.

I also agree with the other comments - it is too early to worry about this yet. They are little ( but important ) details which can be dealt with in preparation for Beta releases.

Especially since Amarok looks like it is getting quite a dramatic facelift.

I agree totally. I posted this sveral times to the marok lists, but they never seemed to understand - therefore, even if Amarok 2 gets some face lift one should point this out again and again... I still prefer JuK for its look.

I depends on uses. when you e.g. have large audio files, say 3 h recordings from radio shows then you want to jump to a precise position. The current slider is totally unusable for that, it is not precise enough.

I think too that Amarok position slider is way too small to be accurate.
I like Kaffeine because i can make slider as own toolbar and then it is big and accurate. And i even like more kaffeine ctrl+J combo where user can just scroll with mouse wheel position what s/he likes to move.

Right now Amarok position slider is just hint for user what part user is listening. By me, i would add more options for user, how to configure Amarok toolbars, now i cant move where is volume slider and where is search bar..
It's not 'a must' wish, but i know many person who would like that, and they really like Amarok!

In my view, cleanup is necessary on the buttons themselves. Why on earth would one still have the "Play" button when a song is being played. This in my opinion should be automatically changed to "Pause". This will save on screen real estate.

Play/Pause has been a toggle button for a long time now. It may be possible that you first used Amarok before the change happened and your tool bars had the individual 'Play' and 'Pause' buttons (if you go into configure toolbars you'll see that theres a 'play' 'pause and 'play/pause', you probably want to replace the 'play' and 'pause' on your toolbar with the 'play/pause' combo). Or maybe you're just running an ancient version of Amarok?

Commenting on the the GUI "cleanliness" is very premature at this point. The port to KDE4/Qt4 started exactly one month ago and the GUI is currently changing on an almost daily basis as people try out new things. Also, the GUI has until now had fairly low priority as just getting the basics to work was plenty of work in itself

Cheer up, there are many months to 2.0 will be released an many things will change before that! :-)

I think at this point they're just experimenting with various different layouts to try and see how they can improve the current one.

Also as for the memory consumption, you can always dig into the source yourself and try to track down where its being eaten, or maybe use valgrind to profile Amarok (or if you don't have the skills for that, find someone you know that does that has free time then pester them to do it for you).

My guess is that a lot of the memory consumption problems are due to the software reuse in the application (SQL backend, UI glitter, Xine engine) and can't easily be stripped down. Reuse is something that I would never say was a bad idea.

Don't get me wrong, it's not as though it's a killer problem. 60-100MB RAM for a piece of software like Amarok is a small price to pay for the features. But it's still pretty heavy (compared to other KDE applications).

As a mere user, I just wanted to point out that I feel strongly that Amarok play to one of its greatest features -- the playlist -- and that this attribute is not lose its prominence in a later version of Amarok.

I simply LOVE that slash screen, hopefully it won't be too hard to switch to using that one after the 'real' splash screen replaces it in SVN (always nice to get a good laugh, and that would definitely give one every morning).

What I can only dream of is a KDE music player that takes 0% of my CPU time during playback. This is the case with every "normal" player such as XMMS, Beep Media Player and of course any Windows player. Even Linux video players take 0% of CPU time during video playback - they can play an MPEG-4 video *with* MP3 audio together and CPU is at 0%. But just silly standalone MP3 audio playback (without video) in any KDE player, including Amarok, requires around 3-4%. This is really interesting and difficult to understand.

On the GUI front, the new screenshot looks only very slightly optimistic - the worst thing about the Amarok GUI is the ridiculously small slider used for navigation (seeking in the file), it is so incredibly awkward and difficult to use... In the new redesigned proposal, it is at least a little bit wider. But the layout is more chaotic and the info panel on the right is just way too narrow to be of any use.

No, it's just Celeron 2.4 GHz. Of course by 0% I mean "less than 1%" - my CPU meter shows only integers. And it's pretty normal when a low-res (320x240 or so) MPEG-4 or similar (WMV, RealVideo) video is played, with MP3 (WMA, RealAudio...) audio in it, the CPU meter shows 0%. But then when I play audio only, in various KDE players, CPU is at 2-20%. While in video players like MPlayer, RealPlayer etc., CPU stays at 0% during audio-only playback, too. So either the CPU meter doesn't show correct numbers, or there's something inherently inefficient about KDE players.

No. Firstly, it's not just MPlayer, and also, even if I close the Amarok window (so it's hidden in the tray and nothing is drawn to the screen, even if I turn off the frequency analyzer and the OSD), CPU is still at 2%. While programs such as RealPlayer or Beep Media Player take 0% of CPU even with the full GUI, with the frequency analyzer turned on...

In my case it makes no difference Amarok being the active window, minimised or iconised on the tray: it uses around 9% of my CPU when playin any MP3 file. This is on a Pentium M 1.7. I can see no difference of CPU utilisation when turing off visualisations and OSD.

Keep in mind with reguard to the ui changes--they were just added to trunk this week. There is still a huge amount of work planned for 2.0; one of the things we really want to spend time on is a much narrower playlist. Until this gets done, the ui is naturally going to look quite bad.

KPlayer is based solely on MPlayer, so it's the closest you are going to get to perfect when it comes to playing you music or movies *and* having a nice interface *and* having the lowest possible CPU usage. KPlayer 0.6.1 is now out BTW! Gotta try it out today.

Gapless has always been broken for me. MPD has been the only player aside from using the command line ogg123 that plays flawless gapless playback. I truly love Amarok and its interface and integration, but c'mon, using xine is delaying the advancements that I consider basic features of music. We need a good audio player to go with the already great interface.

For me, gapless Ogg Vorbis playback in Amarok sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't. I mean, sometimes there's a noticeable gap e.g. between track 2 and 3, but when I go back and play the section again, there's no gap between them. Or vice-versa. So yes, I agree it would be great if it worked flawlessly every time.